Tuesday, September 23, 2014

CSEC in the limelight

OpenMedia has been doing great work raising awareness about electronic snooping and other issues related to the future of the Internet, and the video is well worth a watch.

But it's quite off target in my view, in terms both of the degree to which Canadian communications are likely to be collected by CSEC and of the legality of the activities that CSEC does undertake.

There is good reason to believe that CSEC is scrupulous about obeying the law as it is interpreted for the agency by the Department of Justice. Whether all of those interpretations would survive a court challenge is open to question, of course, and there is some chance that we will eventually get an answer to that question.

But the fact that CSEC's activities are, in the eyes of the government, legal does not erase all of the possible privacy, liberty, security, and public benefit concerns that can be raised about those activities or those of CSEC's Five Eyes allies. OpenMedia would do better to focus on those issues, in my view, than on the narrow question of legality.

There's a nice irony in the fact that one of the "usual suspects" that Ling notes supports the campaign is Amnesty International. Amnesty's founder, Peter Benenson, was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and he worked in the same section as Kevin O'Neill, who later became Chief of CSE.